dmb said to Steve:
Saying things and having the glasses off are two different things. You keep
asking about the "crazy things said by someone with the glasses off" and I keep
telling you that saying things means you don't have the glasses off anymore. As
soon as you start talking you've got the glasses on.
Steve replied:
Pirsig shoulod have been careful to make that distinction, but unfortunately
that is not what Pirsig says. Pirsig says that when the people who "still have
their glasses on" hear the statements of the one who has taken off his glasses,
the ones who "still" have their glasses on "regard his statements as somewhat
weird." ..I see him as having slipped up here. You, it would seem, would prefer
to look the other way. Fine. Whatever.
dmb says to Steve and Matt:
No, I'm saying there is no need to look the other way. You're are objecting to
the idea that someone could take off the interpretive glasses and offer an
interpretation at the same time, which would contradict MOQ's basic
architecture. The MOQ itself is a static interpretation that does, in fact,
make many "crazy sounding" statements about experience without the glasses. The
MOQ itself is an example of "statements of the one who has taken off his
glasses".
I think you are ignoring the substance of his remarks, pretending that he
doesn't have a hell of a lot to say about the connections between DQ, insanity
and enlightenment and you're adding simultaneity to Pirsig's comments in order
to manufacture a "slip up" where there really isn't one. I think you're
objection is fake and petty.
The point of that passage is that the MOQ is an intellectual interpretation
that may sound a bit crazy to common sense ears precisely because it is built
around DQ or uninterpreted experience. Philosophical mysticism sounds weird at
first, he's saying, but the MOQ actually passes the standard test of truth,
including logical consistency and agreement with experience.
Pirsig is a philosophical mystic who makes all kinds of statements about the
mystical reality, the primary empirical reality he had called "Quality" in his
first book. You and Matt repeatedly treat Pirsig's statements as if he were an
analytic philosopher and repeatedly take Pirsig's reality to be a version of
the very things he rejects, namely Plato's fixed Ideas or the objective,
non-human, external reality.
Context is very important. The passage is all about the difference between two
rival sets of glasses; SOM and the MOQ.
"The idea that the world is composed of nothing but moral value sounds
impossible at first. Only objects are supposed to be real. 'Quality' is
supposed to be just a vague fringe word that tells what we think about objects.
The whole idea that Quality can create objects seems very wrong. But we see
subjects and objects as reality for the same reason we see the world right-side
up although the lenses of our eyes actually present it to our brains upside
down. We get so used to certain patterns of interpretation we forget the
patterns are there.
...The same is true of subjects and objects. The culture in which we live hands
us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and the concept
of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right into these glasses.
...This may sound as though a purpose of the Metaphysics of Quality is to trash
all subject-object thought but that's not true. Unlike subject-object
metaphysics the Metaphysics of Quality does not insist on a single exclusive
truth. If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality then we're
permitted only one construction of things - that which corresponds to the
'objective' world - and all other constructions are unreal. But if Quality or
excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more
than one set of truths to exist. Then one doesn't seek the absolute Truth.' One
seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the
knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be
taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along. ...There are
many sets of intellectual reality in existence and we can perceive some to have
more quality than others, but that we do so is, in part, th
e result of our history and current patterns of values. ...The Metaphysics of
Quality provides a better set of coordinates with which to interpret the world
than does subject-object metaphysics because it is more inclusive. It explains
more of the world and it explains it better. The Metaphysics of Quality can
explain subject-object relationships beautifully but, as Phaedrus had seen in
anthropology, a subject-object metaphysics can't explain values worth a damn.
It has always been a mess of unconvincing psychological gibberish when it tries
to explain values."
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